HYL.  On second thoughts, I do not think it so evident that warmth is a pleasure as that a great degree of heat is a pain.

Phil. I do not pretend that warmth is as great a pleasure as heat is a pain.  But, if you grant it to be even a small pleasure, it serves to make good my conclusion.

HYL.  I could rather call it an indolence.  It seems to be nothing more than a privation of both pain and pleasure.  And that such a quality or state as this may agree to an unthinking substance, I hope you will not deny.

Phil.  If you are resolved to maintain that warmth, or a gentle degree of heat, is no pleasure, I know not how to convince you otherwise than by appealing to your own sense.  But what think you of cold?

HYL.  The same that I do of heat.  An intense degree of cold is a pain; for to feel a very great cold, is to perceive a great uneasiness:  it cannot therefore exist without the mind; but a lesser degree of cold may, as well as a lesser degree of heat.

Phil.  Those bodies, therefore, upon whose application to our own, we perceive a moderate degree of heat, must be concluded to have a moderate degree of heat or warmth in them; and those, upon whose application we feel a like degree of cold, must be thought to have cold in them.

HYL.  They must.

Phil.  Can any doctrine be true that necessarily leads a man into an absurdity?

HYL.  Without doubt it cannot.

Phil.  Is it not an absurdity to think that the same thing should be at the same time both cold and warm?

HYL.  It is.

Phil.  Suppose now one of your hands hot, and the other cold, and that they are both at once put into the same vessel of water, in an intermediate state; will not the water seem cold to one hand, and warm to the other?

HYL.  It will.

Phil.  Ought we not therefore, by your principles, to conclude it is really both cold and warm at the same time, that is, according to your own concession, to believe an absurdity?

HYL.  I confess it seems so.

Phil.  Consequently, the principles themselves are false, since you have granted that no true principle leads to an absurdity.

HYL.  But, after all, can anything be more absurd than to say, there is no heat in the fire?

Phil.  To make the point still clearer; tell me whether, in two cases exactly alike, we ought not to make the same judgment?

HYL.  We ought.

Phil.  When a pin pricks your finger, doth it not rend and divide the fibres of your flesh?

HYL.  It doth.

Phil.  And when a coal burns your finger, doth it any more?

HYL.  It doth not.

Phil.  Since, therefore, you neither judge the sensation itself occasioned by the pin, nor anything like it to be in the pin; you should not, conformably to what you have now granted, judge the sensation occasioned by the fire, or anything like it, to be in the fire.